arrows of desire

The Royal Wedding, I know, it’s already so last week. We hadn’t intended to watch, but...what a great show it turned out to be.

All those funny hats the women wore. Like see-through dinner plates on the side of their heads. And Princess Beatrice’s wacko antlers. And the way the royal chappies in their military garb took their hats and white gloves off on entering the cathedral. All that ritualistic British class stuff, all that saluting and  waving.

I’m in the middle of reading ‘Wolf Hall’, a gruelling Booker prize-winning novel set in the court of Henry VIII. The stuffy Westminster Abbey cardinals in their gold and scarlet robes looked straight out of the sixteenth century.

And some of the dreary words they said sounded that way too. Marriage being like the marriage between Christ and The Church. Our Father, Our Lord, I had vaguely  imagined that the church might have updated itself by now.

F, aged 12, was gasping in horror and disgust at every patriarchal utterance Our Father, Our Lord  

The really strange thing is we, his parents told him to hush, because we wanted to hear. Especially the gorgeous choirs. D and I even sang along with‘Jerusalem’ Having been educated at Anglican schools we both knew every one of William Blake’s stirring words. Arrows of desire, chariots of fire...

F looked incredulous, but was about to be even more appalled when his cynical/ pagan /Buddhisty (not to mention republican)  parents started to  drone along with The Lord’s Prayer.

As a kid I thought it was ‘hello’d be thy name and forgive us our trespassers, and none of it made the slightest bit of sense and no-one bothered to explain any of it , and we said it every day in school assembly.

Long-forgotten, yet so familiar and comfortable. And probably the closest we ever came to some sort of spiritual connection.

Well I’ve clearly been successful in my  parental campaign to counter all the patriarchal  Male God crap F used to hear  from his  old  teacher. But I also feel a sense of loss, that he doesn’t know Jerusalem, or the Lord’s Prayer. Like most of his contemporaries he has little sense of the Christian foundations that underpin our culture, for better or (more often) worse.

Of course some righteous people damned the whole wedding circus as a ridiculous waste of money, shameful when so many in the world are suffering. Yes, I can easily go there, the perpetual guilt. Then again, if we waited till everyone was happy before we ever allowed ourselves to celebrate...

And I actually agreed with one of the church guys - the Archbisop of London, I think - who spoke about marrige as a symbol of hope, of new beginning. There are times when we need to celebrate collectively, not just in our little seperate nuclear units - Birth, death, marriage, the things that connect us all. The archbishop also seemed realistic about the challenges of marriage. And spoke of a ‘generous’, rather than a ‘punishing’ God.

( For decades I couldn’t even bring myself to use the word God - so overlaid with Big Bossy Bloke In The Sky connotations. It was Goddess, Great Spirit, All That Is...)

The slowness of the whole thing was sort of restful - the great unedited chunks of nothing much happening, cars approaching, cameras fixed on the empty balcony waiting for the royals to appear. Almost meditative it was, in this era of everything too thick and fast. 

And at the centre of the elaborate theatrical pageant - a young couple who looked as if they actually do like eachother a lot, and seem to know what they’re doing.